Setting the character encoding in form submit for Internet Explorer

Juha Syrjälä picture Juha Syrjälä · Sep 30, 2008 · Viewed 139.3k times · Source

I have a page that contains a form. This page is served with content type text/html;charset=utf-8. I need to submit this form to server using ISO-8859-1 character encoding. Is this possible with Internet Explorer?

Setting accept-charset attribute to form element, like this, works for Firefox, Opera etc. but not for IE.

<form accept-charset="ISO-8859-1">
  ...
</form>

Edit: This form is created by server A and will be submitted to server B. I have no control over server B.

If I set server A to serve content with charset ISO-8859-1 everything works, but I am looking a way to make this work without changes to server A's encoding. I have another question about setting the encoding in server A.

Answer

Trygve Lie picture Trygve Lie · Sep 2, 2009

There is a simple hack to this:

Insert a hidden input field in the form with an entity which only occur in the character set the server your posting (or doing a GET) to accepts.

Example: If the form is located on a server serving ISO-8859-1 and the form will post to a server expecting UTF-8 insert something like this in the form:

<input name="iehack" type="hidden" value="&#9760;" />

IE will then "detect" that the form contains a UTF-8 character and use UTF-8 when you POST or GET. Strange, but it does work.